West Midlands: Transport

Helen Morgan Excerpts

Wednesday 8th May 2024 Westminster Hall

[Helen Morgan (North Shropshire) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Henderson. I also congratulate the hon. Member for Redditch (Rachel Maclean) on securing this important debate. I know I only have a short time in which to speak.

North Shropshire is in the far-flung north-western corner of the west midlands. At the moment, it is a place where people really need a car to move around. I want to focus my remarks on public transport, because it is worth noting that moving around by car is becoming increasingly expensive and very difficult for people living in deprived, very rural areas.

In 2023, the all-party parliamentary group on rural business and the rural powerhouse found that rural households spend about £800 a year more on fuel than people who live in more urban areas. The average distance to their supermarket is much further, and things like insurance are going up. Young people in particular are struggling with car ownership, and currently do not have a viable public transport system to turn to instead. It is absolutely crucial to a healthy rural economy that people can move around. Mobility of labour is a really important supply-side issue, and if people cannot move around from their town or village to have a range of places where they can work or study, we are really putting in a barrier to a thriving economy. That is one of the most important points I want to make today.

Figures from the House of Commons Library show that between 2015 and 2023, the number of miles someone can travel in Shropshire by bus fell the most in England— by 63%. The real point is that bus services, once they start to decline, become unusable and decline even further.

We all understand the difficulties of funding and public subsidy for bus services, but the reality is that we will have to pump-prime them to make them commercially viable in future. Make them frequent, make them reliable, and people will be able to use them. At the moment, if there is only one bus a day into a destination and one bus a day home, that is not a usable service. If someone misses it, they are stuck—and do not suggest a taxi, because there are none of those in Shropshire either.

This is a real problem for my constituency. I might have mentioned before that we can only get one bus service in Shropshire on a Sunday, and that includes Market Drayton—the third largest population centre in Shropshire, which has no kind of Sunday service, while its Saturday service to Shrewsbury and Staffordshire is also at risk. That is a huge problem for young people: they cannot start a college course or get a job outside Market Drayton unless they make the huge financial investment of a car, which many cannot afford.

Older people struggle, too: they may not be able to drive for a number of reasons; they cannot access hospitals by public transport easily; and they have to rely on friends or pay extortionate amounts for unreliable taxi services to get about. If someone lives in Market Drayton in my constituency and wants to get to a college course in Telford, that will probably not work for them because there is no guarantee that the bus service will still be running next year. We need to provide rural communities with an incentive for young people to stay there. Public transport is one of the most important parts of that.

Lots of other people want to speak, so I will move off buses and on to trains. Last year, I was delighted to hear that Oswestry would be reconnected to Gobowen by a new train line. That project is to be fully funded under the restoring your railway fund but, since it was handed over from the original campaigners to the Department for Transport, we have heard no more. Similarly, we expect access for all at Whitchurch station, which does not have step-free access from the southbound platform at the moment. We were promised that the announcement of the funding would be made by the end of the financial year. We are still waiting, and it is starting to feel as if public transport projects go to the Department for Transport to die. Can the Minister give us an update on when we might find out about the step-free access at Whitchurch station and the timetable for the Oswestry-to-Gobowen line? I also add a plug for reopening the train station at Baschurch, to get into Shrewsbury. That would take a lot of people off the road.

Finally, I cannot emphasise enough how important mobility of labour—getting people around in a sensible way—is to our local economy. We need to have reliable bus services that run at appropriate frequency with initial Government subsidy, so that they become reliable, usable and then commercial, and people in places such as North Shropshire can get about.